Hillingar - MirageOS Unikernels on NixOS
A technical write-up details Hillingar, enabling reproducible Nix-based builds and NixOS deployment of MirageOS OCaml unikernels such as authoritative DNS servers.
This blog post (published December 2022, updated February 2025) describes Hillingar, work from the author's master's thesis enabling reproducible builds and deployments of MirageOS OCaml unikernels using Nix and a custom NixOS module, demonstrated with an authoritative DNS server. MirageOS unikernels embed application and low-level OS code in a single kernel, allowing dead-code elimination that reduces attack surface and improves efficiency. The post covers challenges such as solving opam dependency version constraints when linking a single dependency set.
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